Ted Lerner is becoming one of the most popular figures in the DC metro region, but before he was the king of baseball (I haven’t loved baseball this much since I was 12 years old) he was the king of redevelopment and retail. Founded in the 1950s Lerner Enterprises found a niche in taking formerly overlooked but affluent neighborhoods of our region and providing the type of developments that hadn’t been considered before. The companies portfolio is a list of the strongest retail centers in our area and continues to buck trends and confuse naysayers of the brick and mortar realm. The center of the retail empire in this region has been the holdings in Tysons Corner, both his original flagship Tysons Corner, which is now owned by Macerich and Alaska fund, as well as the mixed use development of Tysons II.
He was a visionary from the beginning, but faced criticism over plans of building an ambitious retail center in the middle of the mostly rural Tysons Corner Center in 1968. The mall quickly became a force in retail and is now a property assessed at nearly 1 billion dollars with hundreds of millions in sales annually and employs over 10,000. The farmland at the crossroads of 495 and Route 7 now sees its future expanding beyond a retail giant and becoming a city rivaling Arlington and DC. This may be the first time in the history of… well the world as far as we know, that a city will be born from a mall. Whether or not the future is as bright as planned for Tysons Corner, the area by almost all measures is already a city with over 100,000 corporate jobs, GDP of over a billion dollars, and a growing residential population.
Lerner Enterprises has grown far beyond the retail realm with holdings in residential, commercial, and hotel properties along the East Coast but the focus has always remained over the Washington DC region. After his acquisition of the Nationals in 2006 the company moved forward with the new era of development with high rise construction along the Riverfront near Nats Stadium and expansion of the equally profitable Tysons II and Whiteflint Mall in Maryland.
